The most dangerous thing in publishing may not be rejection. It may be getting exactly what you wanted, then having to figure out how to keep it.
That’s the predicament at the center of #AuthorLife, Zoje Stage’s new publishing satire, originally announced under the pseudonym Joe Zagets. The novel follows Mackenzie “Mack” Lane, a Pittsburgh thriller writer who once sold his debut for six figures and quit journalism to write full time. A few books later, his advances are shrinking, his sales are slipping, and his family still assumes that “published author” means something much closer to “rich.” With another novel approaching publication and increasingly little room for failure, Mack begins looking for ways to manufacture the kind of attention his career no longer seems capable of generating on its own.
For Stage, the joke lands because much of the anxiety beneath it is real. She describes the “skeleton of Mack’s career” as her own, even if his personality—and willingness to go off the rails—are not. #AuthorLife turns the less glamorous realities of publishing into material: failing advances, author envy, reader reviews, unpaid promotional work, social media performance, and the uncomfortable questions of whether being able to publish books is the same thing as being able to make a living from them.
Ahead of the novel’s publication on September 22 via Bad Hands Books, Stage spoke with the Pittsburgh Review of Books about the economics behind Mack’s depression, writing a novel from Squirrel Hill, and why the industry’s most painful moments can also be its funniest.
Jordan Snowden: Publishing in the U.S. is still overwhelmingly centered in New York, yet Mack is watching—and obsessing over—that world from Pittsburgh. What interested you about putting that physical distance between him and the industry whose approval he craves?
Zoje Stage: While the publishing world is centered in New York City, the reality is that that vast majority of authors live elsewhere. Writing novels isn’t location-centric the way making Hollywood movies is, where you pretty much have to be there. And Mack, like most of us in the creative world, would really struggle to afford living in New York City – especially with his complicated family situation. Mack is also a more sensitive creature than he may care to admit, and he functions better in a simpler atmosphere.
JS: Mack lives in Squirrel Hill, and you give us a fairly specific sense of his neighborhood and his view of the city. What did you want Pittsburgh itself to contribute to the novel beyond simply providing a setting? How much of the geography of his author life, where he works, what he sees, how connected or disconnected he feels, comes from your own experience of writing here?
ZS: For the sake of realism – which was important to me for this story – it’s easier to place Mack in a setting I’m intimately familiar with. I live in Squirrel Hill, and the condo where Mack lives was directly inspired by a condo I looked at before I bought my house. It helps me when I write to have very specific images in my mind: If I can clearly see the character in his world, I stand a better chance of conveying it to readers.
Squirrel Hill is a very literate place, with a neighborhood library, multiple bookstores, proximity to so many higher institutes of learning if you’re a research wonk, and multiple coffee shops with different vibes if that’s where you like to write. I know I’m biased, but it feels like a writer’s neighborhood to me.
JS: One of the darker jokes of the novel is how difficult it becomes to separate Mack’s actual career from the career he thinks he should have. Where did Mack learn what a “successful author” is supposed to look like? As someone with an established backlist of your own, how has your definition of a successful author changed over the course of your career?
ZS: I’m a little different from Mack in that I didn’t start out with any sort of idea about what being a successful author would look like. Honestly, I had rather small expectations, and selling Baby Teeth blew that out of the water. But in other ways, Mack and I have a similar mission: to keep writing and publishing books as a means of paying the bills.
I didn’t know when I sold my first book how difficult it would be to keep publishing. I endeavored not to make foolish financial mistakes, though even buying a house was something of a gamble. Mack, also, didn’t realize how difficult it would be – but where selling Baby Teeth changed my life, Mack’s first success changed his ego. I think for a lot of authors, once you’re published you initially form this idea that everything will keep getting better – higher advances, more opportunities. But the reality is very different, and Mack takes his lack of upward mobility quite personally.
JS: Mack asks himself what you call “The Author’s Predicament”: whether he wants to be taken seriously or sell a lot of books. Is the real predicament that he wants both, or that he’s embarrassed to admit how badly he wants both?
Most commercial authors are aware that selling books and being taken seriously aren’t necessarily related, but putting a novel out into the world is an intense experience – made more so by a reality in which all your peers are sharing their successes online, and early reviewers and book bloggers are jockeying for followers. When you see people winning awards or making big book deals, it’s easy to compare yourself – which is a fruitless pastime that all authors should seek to avoid. But there’s also this kind of strange mentality that you shouldn’t be too ambitious – that you should simply be thankful that you get to publish at all and not overtly seek more. But in an industry where almost everyone is struggling in one way or another, wanting more is almost the default…as long as you don’t say that too publicly, lol.
ZS: The book is unusually frank about the economics of authorship. Why was it important to make money, rather than some abstract notion of artistic success, one of the pressures pushing Mack toward increasingly terrible decisions?
We live in a society where everyone consumes creative entertainment every single day – TV, movies, music, books, podcasts. Yet, there’s an unwillingness on a corporate level to think of the creators of these works – which often begin with writers – as the crucial foundation upon which everything else is built. There would be no television shows without writers. There would be no books without writers. It’s universally accepted that people like having these things – yet writers are told that they shouldn’t expect to be able to make a living.
Everyone wants to enjoy what creative people make – but we tell them they should be satisfactorily fulfilled by the act of creating…or maybe the promise of a little bit of “exposure.” How does this make any sense? Of course there can be a purity to creating; I experience something almost magical when I write. I came into writing novels not knowing I could make a living at it – and then I made a living at it and then learned how easily that living could disappear. I’m not as desperate (or as foolish) as Mack, but the economics is a real concern. This is my only real skill, and wanting to be paid fairly shouldn’t be a “pie in the sky” dream. Mack functions as an exaggerated example of this, and he suffers from some serious integrity defects – but he isn’t wrong in wanting to maintain the standard of pay that launched his writing career.
JS: Mack is a man writing female-driven thrillers, and he knows that readers initially mistook “Mackenzie Lane” for a woman. Now we know that you were doing the inverse while writing him: a woman publishing as Joe Zagets. What did that reversal allow you to notice about gender and authorship that you hadn’t expected?
ZS: There hasn’t been time yet, nor have I been able to maintain the anonymity of the pseudonym long enough, to see how people treat the book when it’s perceived to be written by a man. I can’t shake this hunch that some readers will take the book more seriously if they stay in an internet-free bubble and believe Joe is a dude.
I’ve been on this earth long enough to see gender disparity – overt and subtle – play out across all aspects of life. Mack knew he was playing both sides of the coin, trying to gain the trust of women readers while knowing he benefitted from inherent privileges as a white man. I guess in regards to gender, this is where I personally tap into “The Author’s Predicament,” because I believe to my core that men are perceived in general as being more creative, more intelligent, more worthy of respect. It would’ve been interesting to see the experiment of my gender-swapped name go on a little longer; maybe I could’ve supported or disproven my own theory of how my work is perceived.
JS: The reader reviews scattered throughout the novel can be perceptive, petty, contradictory and occasionally absurd. Did you think of those reviewers as a kind of chorus? What can they see about Mack that Mack can’t see about himself?
ZS: The truth is…I culled the chapter epigraphs from reader reviews of four of my books. Except for the needs of this project, I only read reader reviews in the weeks leading up to a book’s publication, so I can learn how it’s being received. Initially, I chose reviews that show the wide variety of comments that authors may hear about their books – from praise to insults, funny to cringe.
Once I chose a broad selection of reviews – some of them edited for length, some not – I tried to align them with an element of each chapter’s content. I think the way in which they function as a chorus is as a demonstration of how every reader perceives a book differently, through the lens of their own experience. The best lesson to take from that, in my opinion, is to not write to try and please or appease, since odds don’t favor the homogenous opinion. I’m not sure if Mack learned the same lesson.
JS: Mack sometimes worries that he’s become a “content creator,” and eventually his own life becomes much better publicity than his fiction. Is the joke that contemporary authors are expected to tell two stories at once?
ZS: The “content creator” aspect comes most into play – for Mack, and real-life authors – during the promo period leading up to a book’s launch, when we’re all expected to provide some amount of “content” for different media. It can become a double-edged sword of hoping some good outlets ask us to write essays, while simultaneously wishing we could be spending our time doing something else. I genuinely enjoy writing essays – probably more than Mack does – but it’s very time consuming, often resulting in losing days of work that I don’t get paid for: Authors are literally providing unpaid content for other websites, for the promise of some “exposure.” There is also sometimes a sense that the world is ravenously hungry for new entertainment, and modern-day commercial authors can feel like a cog-in-a-wheel of a feeding machine, churning out work that isn’t expected to have a real impact.
JS: You told People that keeping Joe Zagets’s identity secret allowed people to read the novel without immediately treating it as your personal indictment of publishing. Now that your name is attached, are you curious, or nervous, to see which parts of Mack and his world people assume are autobiographical anyway?
ZS: I’ll just be honest so people don’t need to speculate: the skeleton of Mack’s career is my career. The specific details are an amalgamation of personal experiences, fiction, and tidbits I’ve picked up surreptitiously from other authors. The key difference between my career and Mack’s – our personalities aside – is that I’ve never worked with anyone who’d match his willingness to go off the rails. The publishing industry is full of very smart and hardworking people…but that doesn’t have much bearing on what authors experience in their day-to-day lives.
Perhaps because I’m on the autism spectrum, I’ve always been almost pathologically honest – and I don’t like secrets – so dealing with realism in this regard feels more satisfying, even if it makes me vulnerable to speculation. For the record, absolutely none of the people in this book are a reflection of anyone I’ve ever met or worked with – but the general stuff that creates the ups and downs of Mack’s writing career? Yup, that’s real.
JS: You’ve written publicly before about how publishing encourages writers to trumpet the “ups” while remaining quiet about the “downs.” #AuthorLife takes many of those downs and turns them into comedy. Was satire a way of saying something about the business that would have been harder to say straightforwardly?
ZS: For those of us in publishing who use social media, there’s a behavior that we all engage in: Put on a smile and share the good news. This tendency is part of why even quite successful authors are eager to see behind the façade of other authors’ experiences, as keeping your tribulations to yourself can feel very lonely and isolating. Before my first novel was even published, I felt like I was living a bifurcated life that consisted of what I posted online versus what was actually going on behind the scenes – and make no mistake, having soul crushing moments as an author is common. Truly, this is a career of highs and lows.
With all of that said, because of how earnest authors are – and publishing people in general – there are things that can seem humorous from afar. Not to harp on the bifurcated life aspect, but this business has made me cry, and sometimes it makes me shake my head and laugh. And I think, especially where satire is concerned, that the most absurd things speak loudest to the deep truths beneath the surface.
